Although in various parts of the world I have met two or three gunners who were not Norwegians, there are not many such. From their Viking ancestors the Scandinavians have inherited their love for the sea and, since Svend Foyn’s time, Tønsberg has sent forth her sons to the whaleships much as did New Bedford half a century ago. Thus the present generation has grown up as the industry developed, and from boys to men they have seen it in all its phases and learned not only how to shoot a whale but how to handle it afterward, which is fully as important.
A trial shot with the harpoon-gun. The harpoon line is shown, and three men may be seen in the barrel at the mast head.
Even as the harpoon-gun brought with it a new era of whaling, so it gave to the scientist undreamed-of opportunities for the study of cetaceans. Until shore stations were established, few indeed were the naturalists who had examined more than five or six whales during their entire lives. These carcasses were usually of whales which had met with some accident at sea and had been cast up on the beach; almost always the animals had been dead for days before they came under the notice of a competent scientific observer, and had lost much of their original proportions and color. A whale’s body begins to generate gases at an astounding rate as soon as the animal is dead, and within a very few hours becomes so swelled and distorted that the true proportions are almost lost. Even trained naturalists did not always take this fact into consideration, and their descriptions and figures were consequently notable chiefly for their inaccuracy.
It is only within a very few years that it has been generally recognized how rapidly cetaceans change color when dead, and often in scientific papers whales are described as “black” which are never black in life. By far the greater number of whales and dolphins have various shades of slate, or gray, on the upper parts, and if exposed to the sun for a few hours these portions turn jet black.
Again, there is in all cetaceans great variation among individuals of the same species, and whales from the same school or “pod” may differ widely in proportions and general color. Some may be long and slender, others short and thick; one may have a light gray back and pure white underparts, while a second, taken from the same herd, is dark slate above and strongly shaded below; and, moreover, the skeletons often vary almost as greatly as the external characters.
A near view as the gun is fired at a target. The harpoon rope is visible through the smoke.
Quite naturally when these extremes came under the notice of a scientist who had, perhaps, seen but three or four whales in his entire life, they were at once judged to be representative of different species and were given new names. This course cannot be wholly condemned, for under existing conditions it was almost the only one to be followed. Although it did put on record many valuable facts concerning the history of the animals, it also resulted in multiplying nominal species to such an extent that the work of later investigators in separating the valid from the invalid has become a herculean task; quite false conclusions as to the distribution of the various whales were also drawn, which only a vast amount of labor and study can rectify.
The number of whales taken during a season varies greatly with the locality, but at one of the Vancouver Island stations when I was there in 1908, three hundred and twenty-five were killed in seven months by one ship. In a single week twenty-six whales were captured, and on June 10, the S. S. St. Lawrence, Captain Larsen, brought in four humpbacks, one blue whale, and one finback.